HACKER Q&A
📣 cryptozeus

Successful one-person online businesses?


This question was asked 3 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243) by mdoliwa, and I'm curious what it looks nowadays. > How many people on hacker news are running successful online businesses on their own? What is your business and how did you get started?

> Defining successful as a profitable business which provides the majority of the owners income.


  👤 theturtletalks Accepted Answer ✓
https://openship.org

I needed a way to manage multi-channel fulfillment for my e-commerce businesses. We were using Zapier and Google Sheets, but it wouldn’t scale as orders went up. Learned to code, built a system, and turned that into a B2B SaaS.

If you’re thinking about starting a one-man business and are nervous, just take the leap. Before starting Openship, I would think multiple steps ahead and that felt daunting.

“How will I deploy this?”

“How will I market? PMF?”

Don’t let the issues that will show up weeks or months from now stop you from starting today.


👤 seanwilson
I run this freemium Chrome extension myself, you use to crawl websites you're working on to find SEO, speed and security issues:

https://www.checkbot.io/

You can recheck multiple pages at a time as often as you want to confirm you've fixed issues (including localhost sites) so you can catch problems before they make it to your live site. Most tools like this also only check a single page at a time so they miss hard to spot problems like e.g. duplicate titles between pages (bad for search results) and broken links on pages you might have created when working on another page.

I got started making it because I couldn't find anything similar when working as a freelance web developer on websites that had lots of issues to fix.


👤 ezekg
I run https://keygen.sh, a software licensing and distribution API. I built it back in 2016 to scratch my own itch and it grew from there. It’s now my full-time job, sole income source. Still just me.


👤 mbarbar
You may like this blog post from last year if you have not come across some of these businesses: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/small-tech/

Not all are just a single person though.


👤 blitz_skull
LunchMoney comes to mind.

https://lunchmoney.app/

Disclaimer: I don’t own this business. Just a faithful acolyte proselytizing the gospel of LunchMoney! :)

The community and app that Jen (the founder) has built is really impressive on multiple levels.


👤 PianoGym
Depends on your definition of success, but I have made a website called Piano Gym (https://PianoGym.cpm) to help people learn Piano and Music Theory in the context of actual sheet music.

Here's a quick video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxNDhOjlh4

Piano Gym is a learning and practice ecosystem focused on prioritizing music theory and performance skills acquisition through the use of flash cards. We used flash cards in order to pair them with modern learning techniques like spaced repetition, graded feedback, and progress tracking so that you can practice material and work through content that is managed by Piano Gym, and all you have to do is enroll in a school/course/lesson and do your reps! Just show up every day and do 15 minutes of reviews. You're going to make progress.

Our website uses the Piano to navigate exercises as well as regular keyboard/mouse input. We work on browser technology and are looking to eventually make it mobile devices.

We provide content creation for everyone so that anyone can make their own schools/courses/lessons and the best part is each school gets its own landing page.

For example we're using the methods book from https://freepianomethod.com which is provided by Mayron Cole, and if you wanted to practice it without signing up or enrolling you could easily visit this link: https://pianogym.com/schools/Mayron%20Cole%20Method

Even better when you find the piece you want to practice you can share it directly like so: https://pianogym.com/schools/Mayron%20Cole%20Method?sheet_mu...

It's a work in progress, but I'm pretty pleased with it :)


👤 Glench
There are probably some candidates in this other thread (making > $500/month): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095

Calling @czue lol


👤 azophy_2
I recommend checking out the IndieHackers Community (indiehackers.com). There are plenty thriving one-person companies there